Toshiba's flagship Qosmio line of notebooks have been, for the longest time, big, flashy, red and black beasts. These juggernauts sported 18" screens with high-end graphics and processing power, but at the same time they were...well, probably not the most attractive notebooks on the market. But Toshiba's success with the 13" Portege has led to some design changes, and the Qosmio has gone under the knife. It's still a substantial desktop replacement notebook, but it's shed a couple pounds, an inch off of the display, and some of the gloss. Is Toshiba's major redesign a success?

Toshiba's Qosmio line has tended to aim pretty high and unfortunately then as now they have some stiff competition. While the new Qosmios are priced to move and Sandy Bridge gaming notebooks aren't necessarily out in force at low prices, Toshiba still has to contend with ASUS's G74 refresh of our personal favorite budget gaming machine, the G73. ASUS kept the cooling system and fixed the keyboard, and we should have our review posted soon. For now, though, Toshiba has specced the new Qosmios across a number of price points, starting at an MSRP of $1,199 and going all the way up to a 3D-enabled model for $1,899. Here's the review system we received.

Most of what we're seeing here we've become fairly accustomed to. Intel's Core i7-2630QM is practically ubiquitous right now, offering the most inexpensive mobile quad-core solution Intel's ever had, and Toshiba backs it up in this configuration with 6GB of DDR3; the 3D Qosmio, their $1,899 flagship model, bumps this to 8GB. The i7 and 6GB of DDR3 are joined by Intel's HM65 chipset, which doesn't support RAID.

The new blood here is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M, which we haven't had a chance to really play with yet. This chip offers a very healthy bump in performance from the 460M; while it retains the 192 CUDA cores and 192-bit memory bus connected to GDDR5, the clock has gone up 100MHz to 775MHz (and correspondingly brought the shader clocks up to 1550MHz). The GDDR5 remains clocked at an effective 2.5GHz. Since i7-2630QM-equipped gaming notebooks are fairly common, we should be able to provide a fairly direct apples-to-apples comparison to see how much that clock bump affects the 560M's performance; given the specs, it should be roughly as powerful as a desktop GTS 450.

As for the rest of the Qosmio, it's fairly business as usual, with USB 3.0 and 2.0 support, a card reader, gigabit Ethernet, wireless-n, and Bluetooth. Toshiba opts to equip this model with a pair of 500GB 7200RPM hard drives; models further up the chain incorporate Seagate's Momentus XT hybrid drive as the system drive. There's a welcome Blu-ray reader, too, but your spirits will be dampened somewhat to know the screen is the exact same panel we just reviewed in our $700 Llano notebook: a 17.3", 1600x900 panel by Samsung. The only way to get 1080p in a Qosmio now is to buy the 3D Vision enabled $1,899 model. Boo, hiss!

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25 Comments

Nice to see two drive bays, a must-have feature for me now. But 2 RAM slots? What?

You guys really need to take a look at the MSI GT780 for a review. I got one a month ago and am (mostly) in love, it was an easy decision to skip past the ASUS for this baby. My only complaint is about the keyboard but I suspect it may be particular to me and I have I'll be sending it back to them to check it out when I have time.

Apart from the excellent specs on the MSI compared to the competition, I love the look of it because I'm not much of a gamer, more of a power user and I don't need awkward looks when I take it with me on business trips.

About the keyboard on your MSI laptop: it's NOT just you, their build quality just sucks... Fortunately humans are adaptable creatures and I've somehow gotten used to the keyboards ridiculous unresponsiveness after a few months with the laptop I have that was made by them.Reply

The GT780 has a custom keyboard made and branded by Steelseries, they're using it as one of their major selling points. I am slowly getting used to it but shifting from the *beautiful* das keyboard on my desktop is quite an adjustment!Reply

What is up with the off-center touch pad? I used a couple laptops with the touch pad centered around the space bar (with a number pad) and found it very difficult to find my way to and from the keyboard and touch pad.

Maybe I'm old fashioned and like my touch pads aligned center of the screen, but I kept fingers kept falling to the left (or off) of the touch pad. Perhaps my movements were strictly keyboard-to-touch pad and back; I was just using the notebook as a normal user, browsing the web and such.

Either way, I was able accommodate, though throughout the process it felt somewhat unnatural. I almost felt as if I should shift my body slightly left for the keyboard/mouse -- which I did.Reply

The idea is that if you're typing, you'd have your palms resting to the left and right of the space bar, and you wouldn't want them on the touchpad. It looks a little odd, by my personal experience is that if the touchpad isn't directly below the space bar, I repeatedly brush it while typing -- that can suddenly move the cursor so I'm typing somewhere else, which is very annoying.Reply